Conspiracy Theory:
The ‘Chinese Colleagues’ and the Seward-Bruce Anglo-American Secret Détente to
Contain the Fenian Invasion of Canada, 1865-1866

Peter Vronsky, Ph.d.

ABSTRACT

Historians have always argued that U.S. President
Andrew Johnson and his Secretary of State William Seward either secretly
conspired with Irish American Fenian insurgents in their attempt to invade
Canada in 1866 or at least “looked the other way” as the Fenians mobilized for
their incursion.

A
review of the diplomatic despatches of Frederick Bruce, the British envoy in
Washington at the time, reveals a conspiracy indeed; not between the United
States and the Fenians to invade Canada but one between Britain and the United
States to secretly containthe Fenians without Irish American voters
finding out. According to one of the plan’s architects, William Seward, stopping
the Irish Fenians was in “the interest of the two great branches of the
Anglo-Saxon race on opposite sides of the Atlantic.”

The
origins of this agreement were rooted in US-British cooperation on issues of
mutual interest in China during the American Civil War period in the midst of
the so-called “Osborne Flotilla – Vampire Fleet Affair.” Two former ‘Chinese Colleagues’,
the ex-British envoy to China Frederick Bruce and the American ambassador there
Anson Burlingame, were instrumental in the negotiation and implementation of
the secret Fenian containment plan in Washington in November of 1865.

The
rise of the Fenian trans-Atlantic threat, the British intelligence response to
the emerging trans-Atlantic threat, the Canadian “intelligence failure” to
anticipate the invasion and the agreement negotiated by Seward and Bruce for a
joint Anglo-American secret policy to contain the Fenians, and its impact on
the Fenian Raids on Canada in June 1866, is described and documented here in
its full scope and scale for the first time.

Introduction

On
June 1, 1866 an advance party of one thousand heavily armed Irish-American
Fenian insurgents invaded Canada across the Niagara River from their staging area
in Buffalo, N.Y. They quickly captured the town of Fort Erie on the Canadian
side and its railway and telegraph terminals. The Fenians arrested the town
council and the customs and border officials at Fort Erie’s international ferry
docks and forced the town’s bakery and hotels to provide breakfast for them.
After cutting outgoing telegraph lines to Canada but keeping control of those
to Buffalo, the insurgents seized horses (including the entire reserve horsepower
of the Niagara Street Railway Company), along with tools to entrench and build field
fortifications with. By the end of that first day, the Fenians stood ready and
within marching distance to next threaten the strategic Welland Canal, the only
navigable naval passage between Lake Ontario and Lake Eire.[3]

Most of the Fenians were recently demobilized, battle
hardened Civil War veterans: experienced officers, infantrymen, sappers,
gunners and other trades. The invasion plan had been devised by the Fenian Secretary of War, Thomas W.
Sweeny, a legendary one-armed former U.S. Army General who had lead troops in
the Mexican-American War (in which he lost his arm) as well as the Civil War.

On the field in their incursion into Canada on the Niagara
frontier the Fenians were led by Colonel John O’Neill, a thirty-two-year-oldformer U.S. Calvary captain with a reputation as a fierce
and highly competent mounted anti-guerilla warfare specialist in Ohio and West
Virginia during the war.[4]

The Fenian plan to seize and hold Canada hostage, June 1866

The
Fenian force included units from Buffalo, many of them recruited from iron and
steel workers from the mills along the Niagara River and Erie Canal, reinforced
by Fenians arriving by train from as far as Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee,
and even Louisiana in their regimental formations, a mix of former Confederate
and Union Army veterans. Approximately five thousand Fenian insurgents were
assembling in Buffalo, when O’Neill took the first wave of one thousand across
the Niagara River in barges in the early morning hours on June 1.

O’Neill’s brigade was the advance party of a projected twenty
thousand strong Fenian force calling itself the Irish Republican Army (IRA)
prepared to strike into Canada across the borders of New York, Michigan, Ohio
and Vermont. Numerically it was a plausible plane. The Fenian Brotherhood
with fifty-thousand enrolled members, mostly Civil War veterans, was America’s
largest ethnic nationalist organization at the time. Backing it were four or
five times its membership of ‘civilian’ male and female supporters, bond
buyers, due payers and non-military volunteers.[5]

The Fenian Raids often characterized as an intemperate
Irish whimsy to “conquer Canada” were actually intended to temporarily seize
and hold Canadian territory hostage, precipitating a crisis in Britain, perhaps
even a war between Britain and United States, and weakening British resolve in
Ireland once a planned rebellion broke out there. Key to the Fenian plan was
their belief that the United States in its current hostile relations with
Britain, would not prevent Fenian seizures of territory in the British North
American provinces.

The Conspiracy Theory: “undertaken with, at the very least, the tacit
encouragement of the President and Secretary of State”

A
rival faction of Fenians had already attempted a raid from Maine onto the
remote island of Campobello in New Brunswick in April that year. That failed
raid immediately sparked rumours of a U.S. government annexationist conspiracy to
secretly sanction Fenian incursions into Canada, or at least the existence of a
personal nod and wink of approval from Republican President Andrew Johnson, who
had replaced the assassinated Abraham Lincoln a year earlier, and his Secretary
of State William H. Seward, a holdover from the Lincoln war cabinet. Once the
larger second Fenian raid on Canada in June occurred, the speculation of an
American conspiracy only grew in scope and grandeur and has never been entirely
laid to rest even today.[6]

President Andrew Johnson and U.S. Secretary of State William Seward

Compounding suspicions of a Washington plot behind the
invasion was the presence in Buffalo of a formidable U.S. Navy warship, the USS
Michigan, which had been alerted by the Buffalo mayor of the Fenian
movements in the hours prior to the invasion. The Michigan could have
easily stopped the Fenian crossing of the Niagara River but instead the vessel
mysteriously stood by idly as barges down river a short distance, ferried
insurgents and supplies into Canada all night and morning on June 1.
Furthermore, the President of the United States appeared to remain silent for
five days before he issued a proclamation condemning the invasion and published
orders for the U.S. military to intervene. Canadians were suspicious of the
apparent American foot dragging. The assumption was the proclamation had come
only after it was evident that the Fenian invasion was going to fail.

To this day it seems almost universally implausible for
there not to have been a conspiracy. A hundred years after the
invasion, historian C.P. Stacey, on behalf of the Canadian Armed Forces
historical section, concluded

There seems little doubt that the Fenian raids of 1866 were
undertaken with, at the very least, the tacit encouragement of the President
and Secretary of State.[7]

Most historians indeed characterize Johnson and Seward’s
policy towards the Fenians as “ambiguous”, “ambivalent” or “complacent”,
dangling before us a tantalizing possibility of a hidden American hand behind
the Fenian invasion of Canada.[8]
It would be natural for any post-1960s to post-9/11 scholar to instinctively
gravitate toward the notion of American clandestine intervention and ‘regime
change’ as a given in the culture of U.S. foreign policy.

I myself became taken by this murky question of the possibility
of a ‘hidden American hand’ behind the 1866 Raids when I came across in the
Toronto Police archives an intelligence report from December 1865 of a U.S.
Army officer addressed a secret meeting of Fenians in Detroit planning to
invade Canada.[9]
The presence and even participation of U.S. Army personnel at Fenian meetings
had become the subject of contentious diplomatic complaints by Britain in the
year before the Fenian raids.[10]

The alleged pledge by Johnson and Seward to the Fenians to “acknowledge accomplished
facts”

At
the centre of this conspiracy theory is an often repeated claim that Johnson
and Seward permitted U.S. government arsenals to sell tens of thousands of
surplus Civil War weapons and munitions to the Fenians while promising them
that seizures of territory in Canada would be recognized by the United States.
This pledge allegedly occurred in Washington in the summer of 1865 during a
meeting between Bernard Doran Killian, the Fenian Treasurer, and Johnson and
Seward. Killian was lobbying for the release of a senior Fenian leader held on
charges of being a Confederate. Killian later claimed that during the meeting
he broached the subject of U.S. recognition of territory the Fenians might
seize in Canada (British North America) and that Johnson and Seward famously
responded they would “acknowledge accomplished facts.”[11]

Killian later reported this alleged promise to the Fenian
Congress in Philadelphia in October 1865 when the debate on the invasion of
Canada had begun in earnest. His claim would be later repeated in the pages of
the Irish Republic on February 15, 1868 and January 16, and 23, 1869.[12] Except for
the often cited passages from the diary of Gideon Welles, the U.S. Secretary of
the Navy, in which Welles accuses Seward of being “very chary” in responding to
the Fenian raid on Campobello, Killian’s claims appear to be the sum total of
all the evidence (at best) for secret support or sanction of the Fenian
invasion by the U.S. administration.[13]

Historians nonetheless continue to gnaw on this bone of a
possible conspiracy. William D’Arcy, the scholar behind the definitive history
of the American Fenian movement, in his magisterial 1947 study, ploughed ahead
blindly in the chase for a conspiracy, arguing that on November 18, 1865, Killian
contacted Seward again, this time attempting to solicit a written commitment
from him to the previously given verbal promise. Killian sent the letter by
hand with Reverend Curly, a trusted Fenian envoy with access to Seward. According
to D’Arcy, no written reply to the letter was given but that a verbal “answer
made to the Fenian priest agreed in substance with that given Killian, because
the Fenians proceeded with their plans.”[14]
[My emphasis.]

That is how even sober historians like William D’Arcy, instinctually
yearn to find some hidden conspiratorial U.S. hand behind the Fenian incursion
into Canada.

The problem is Seward in fact did give a written
reply to Killian’s message two days later, which the otherwise meticulous
D’Arcy overlooked. Seward wrote Killian explicitly, “this Government expects
to maintain and enforce its obligations and perform its duties towards all
other nations” and that it will not be “compatible with the public interest” for
him to engage in any further official correspondence with the Fenian Brotherhood.[15] Seward’s
declaration of his intention to defend the neutrality of the U.S.-Canadian
border was an explicitly clear written warning to the Fenians that the State
Department would not condone or tolerate their planned invasion into Canada.
And there the Killian conspiracy scenario shrivels on its vine.

In
the end there was a secret conspiracy. Not between the Fenians and the
U.S. to invade Canada and seize it from Britain; but between the U.S. and
Britain to secretly contain the Fenians from invading Canada without Irish
American voters finding out at a critical time when the Republican
administration needed their vote.

The evidence presented in these pages, will demonstrate
that this was not an improvised ‘field’-level policy, but a strategic policy of
trans-Atlantic secret cooperation negotiated by the British envoy Frederick
Bruce in Washington in November 1865, in private meetings with U.S. President
Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward, and endorsed by the
British Prime Minister Lord Russell, Foreign Secretary George William Frederick
Villiers, Earl of Clarendon, a decision of such strategic significance, that it
included a briefing of Queen Victory upon its implementation.

It targeted Fenians on both sides of the Atlantic, those
operating in the United States and those claiming American citizenship
operating in Ireland and subject to arrest by British authorities over there, a
thorny issue at the time in the international debates on the supremacies and
immunities of natural born British crown subjects versus acquired citizenship
in the American republic. In the words of the plan’s architect, William
Seward, when it came to the question of the Irish on both sides of the Atlantic,
“the interest of the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race on opposite
sides of the Atlantic was to go together.”[16]

Not only was this policy hidden from Americans, especially
Irish-Americans, but from ordinary Britons and Canadians of all rank. Even
Canada’s colonial provincial premier, attorney general and minister of militia,
John A. Macdonald and his cabinet, were not made privy to it by the British.
In fact, we will see that the British in their cooperation with the Americans, even
exposed the identity of Macdonald’s personal intelligence mole, a Canadian
former Sheriff, inside the Fenian headquarters in Buffalo, New York.

How all this first began to come together, in China, bizarrely
of all places, and what it means to the chronology of Anglo-American
international relations and the historiography of the Fenian Raids on Canada,
the apparent intelligence failure in anticipating the Raids and what happened
aboard the USS Michigan in Buffalo on the night of the invasion, are the
subject of this article.

* * *

Fenian Brotherhood and Domestic Espionage in the British Empire

Dedicated
to expelling the British monarchy from Ireland and establishing a republic, the
Fenian Brotherhood (FB) was the legal American branch of the insurgent Irish
Republican Brotherhood (IRB) founded in Dublin in 1858. In simple terms, the
Fenians can be described as the 19th century predecessors of the
IRA—the Irish Republican Army. (In fact, the Fenian invaders of Canada are the
first to use that nomenclature.) While the Fenians were a legal organization
in the United States, in the British Empire, including in Toronto and Montreal,
they operated clandestinely.

British authorities were mostly unaware
of the extent of the connection between Fenians in the United
States and the IRB in Ireland until the summer of 1864
when James Stephens, one of the co-founders of the IRB sailed to the U.S. and
toured Fenian cells there.[17]It would be, however, an
incident in Toronto on Guy Fawkes’ Night in November 1864 that would alert the British to the
international extent and scope of the Fenian network throughout the Empire.[18]On the night of
November 5-6, reacting to
rumours in Toronto’s Catholic community that Orangemen planned to assemble and
burn an effigy of Daniel O’Connell along with one of Guy Fawkes, the Hibernian
Benevolent Society, a militant Irish Catholic
self-defense association, and a Fenian cell secreted
within it, suddenly deployed
some three hundred armed men into the streets of the Toronto. Operating in small, highly disciplined squads, they rapidly
seized strategic points throughout the city, isolating the few on-duty police constables in their stations and
preventing those at home from being mobilized or the
militia being called out. Toward morning, the Fenian
squads assembled into two large companies on opposite
sides of the city and just before dawn fired their muskets into the air,
rattling window-panes everywhere.Then at
daylight’s gleaming they melted away as quickly as
they had appeared, leaving in
their wake a shocked and frightened Protestant populace fearing that they would
be murdered in their beds in a sectarian massacre.[19]
The incident triggered a paranoid panic in Canada throughout November and
December[20] and brought the term “Fenian” for the first time into Canadian
government correspondence.[21]

The Toronto Globe reported, “It is quite evident
that these men were completely organized and prepared for any emergency and had
the Orangemen turned out, there would have been a scene of bloodshed such as
Toronto has rarely seen.”[22]
In the following days, the Toronto Police raided a tavern on Queen Street
where a Hibernian lodge was believed to meet and discovered a number of pike
heads and staves, the traditional feared instrument of Irish rebellion. As it could not be proved that these
pikes were carried in the Guy Fawkes’Night demonstration, the tavern proprietor,
John McGuire, was released, whereas the pikes mysteriously “disappeared” while
in police custody.[23]

The Globe went on to publish a
letter without comment several weeks later, among the earliest references in
its pages to the possibility of an active Fenian network in Canada. The letter
writer warned:

A second “massacre of Bartholomew” may be
expected, unless we guard carefully against it. It is well known that the
Fenian organization has a network throughout the whole of Canada, and at a
given time the different corps will rise en masse and deal destruction
to all Protestants ... In the Roman Catholic churches the “pikes” (of which we
heard so much in this city), guns, pistols, and ammunition, are stored in great
quantities, so as to be ready at the appointed time. These offensive weapons
have been distributed through the connivance of Roman Catholic Custom-house
officers … our hitherto peaceful country is to be devastated by similar horrors
to those perpetrated by the midnight assassins in Ireland. Murder and arson
will stalk through the land unless prompt action is taken to nip the rising
spirit in the bud.[24]

The event in Toronto also had a tremendous
impact on the British reluctance to use domestic spies outside of Ireland. After
numerous abuses earlier in the century involving government spies and provocateurs
during the Luddite, Chartist and Reform crises, the British decided that
domestic spying was wrong and un-English. Britain not only stopped
spying at home after 1848, but with a few exceptions (Ireland being one) was
decidedly anti-spy in its political culture. Even in their colonies where the
British never hesitated to adopt a double standard, domestic spying was
scrupulously avoided. As the historian of British domestic intelligence,
Bernard Porter points out, “A strong aversion to the use of spies was one of
the alien traditions of government which the British brought to India in the
nineteenth century.”[25]Now, at the behest of the British Consul in New York, the Truro, Nova Scotia–born
Edward Mortimer Archibald, the British began in December to recruit spies in
both Canada and the U.S. to infiltrate the Fenians.[26]

Since the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, the Fenian
Brotherhood urged Irish-Americans to join the U.S. army and get training and
experience for a planned anti-British uprising in Ireland once the war was
over. This was not something the U.S. government discouraged during its
desperate need for recruits and when the war came to its end in April 1865,
American Fenians began to trickle weapons and men over to Ireland in
preparation for the uprising there.

Anglo-American Hostilities and the Rise of the Fenian Threat

When
Britain became fully aware of the connection between American Fenians and the
IRB plan for rebellion in Ireland and on March 14, 1865 lodged its first
official protest to the U.S. on the question of the Fenian Brotherhood
operating legally and openly in the United States, Anglo-American relations were
historically at a low point.[27]
During the Civil War Britain and the United States had nearly come to war with
each other over the support Britain had been giving the Confederacy. Nor had
Anglo-American relations entirely healed since the American Revolution, the War
of 1812, and the 1844-1846 Pacific boundary dispute in which the British were
forced to compromise on their claim of a Pacific border from Russian Alaska to
then Mexico’s frontier for the one currently dividing Canada from the United
States at the 49th parallel.

During the war Britain maliciously looked the other way as
British factories and shipyards produced weapons and ordinance for the
Confederate States. The Confederate Army was armed with British-made Enfield
rifles while British-built Confederate Navy gunboats sank and attacked U.S.
shipping around the world, even as far as in the Indian Ocean.[28]

As the Civil War progressed, the Confederate Army and
Secret Service began to use Canada as a base for raids into the United States.
Some of these were actively supported and even financed by prominent Canadians
like Toronto alderman, attorney, land baron and militia officer George T.
Denison III who saw the Confederate southern slave power landed plantation
aristocracy akin in old world order values to his own United Empire Loyalist
aspirations.[29]

The British March 14 grievance focused on American Fenian
activities in Ireland and reminded the Americans of their own recent protests
over Confederate raids coming from Canadian territory. In wording their
protest, the British pointed out those rebel Confederate Army raids from Canada
had been “conducted with outmost secrecy”, while the Fenian meetings in the
U.S. plotting rebellion in Ireland and invasion of Canada were being held
openly and attended by U.S. military personnel. The British demanded that the
U.S. prevent its military and civil officials from attending Fenian meetings
and congresses.[30]

William Seward’s response to the British at the time was
predictably unfriendly. He stated that as long as the Fenians did not actually
do anything, their freedom of assembly and speech were protected by the
Constitution. U.S. laws and regulations were “ample” for the prevention of any
Fenian violations of neutrality and their enforcement was entirely dependent
upon the British response to U.S. complaints on “aggressions committed by
British subjects against the peace and sovereignty of the United States.”[31]

As the Civil War drew to an end in April 1865, Seward
prepared for negotiations with Britain over American claims for compensation
that began in the amount of $2 billion ($53.4 billion today) for losses
inflicted by British-built Confederate vessels, a case that became known by one
of the ships’ names—the Alabama Claims.[32]
This extraordinary opening-bid amount was arrived at by a Seward-influenced
faction of Manifest Destiny “compensationalists” in the Senate’s Foreign
Relations Committee in the hope that the British would surrender in compensation
to the United States the territory of today’s British Columbia, Manitoba and
Nova Scotia in lieu of a cash settlement.[33]
The Alabama Claims negotiations dragged on until 1871 when finally an
international arbitration committee of representatives from U.S., Britain,
Brazil, Italy and Switzerland awarded the United States a reparation payment of
$15.5 million. While hardly the $2 billion originally claimed, it nonetheless
was the largest internationally arbitrated monetary award in history up to that
time. It concluded with the Treaty of Washington 1871, traditionally held as
the moment in which the United States and Britain ‘normalized’ relations and
began on the path of Anglo-American friendship that endures to this day.

Seward’s annexationist aspirations during the 1865-1871 Alabama
Claims gave credence for historians to his possible endorsement in 1866 of
a Fenian seizure of the territories of Upper and Lower Canada, which would
complete the total dismemberment of British North America in the annexationist
dream plan. When in the autumn of 1865 the British in Ireland arrested
Fenians planning an uprising there, the American Fenian Brotherhood began to
consider the invasion of Canada as an alternative. Seward was cognisant that
any counter-claims that could be raised by the British for possible Fenian
damage in Canada would complicate the upcoming Alabama negotiations and
he resisted all attempts at linking the two issues in his discussions with
Britain.

Seward’s Approach to Britain: October 1865

In
October 1865 as Fenian calls to invade Canada began to rise in tempo, Seward approached
the British envoy in Washington, who immediately reported it to London, “Mr.
Seward remarked that he thought the Fenian affair much exaggerated, and that
nothing would serve so much to give it importance as that it become the subject
of official correspondence.”[34]

Seward’s odd invitation for Britain to secretly collaborate
with the United States in a conspiracy of silence—literally—against the Fenian
Brotherhood has been nonchalantly described over forty years ago by historians
of the Fenian movement, Brian Jenkins and Leon Ó Broin. But both of them were focused
exclusively on the invitation’s impact on the Fenians in Ireland and not on its
significance to Canada and to the Fenian invasion there or to Anglo-American
relations in general, nor did they explore the extent of its formal scope and
structure.[35]
This so significant approach from Seward on the idea of friendly cooperation
with the British against the Fenians, arguably was the hidden beginning of
Anglo-American détente still enjoyed today. Making this history even more
obscure is that the first seeds to this trans-Atlantic Anglo-American
cooperation were sown far from the Irish British North
American theatre of action; in China.

The Osborne Flotilla “Vampire Fleet” and the Chinese Colleagues

The
first hint on the record to this hidden history of Anglo-American relations appears
in the form of sporadic references to the “Osborne Flotilla” which suddenly
began to appear in American diplomatic correspondence with the British in late
December 1865, just as the Fenians were ramping up their plans for Canada and
just as Seward and Bruce were negotiating their joint plan in Washington. Known
to the Chinese as the “Vampire Fleet” the Osborne Flotilla was at the centre of
an obscure episode there in 1862-1864.

During the Taiping Rebellion in China, the British Envoy to
Peking, Frederick William Adolphus Wright-Bruce devised a plan to supply the
compliant Imperial Qing Dynasty with a fleet of state-of-the-art gunboats to
put down the anti-imperial rebels.[36]
In 1863 British opium war naval captain Sherard Osborne was put in command of
the flotilla of seven British-crewed gunboats and a supply ship, which,
although paid for by the Chinese and nominally part of their navy, was actually
controlled by Horatio Nelson Lay, the British General Inspector of Customs in
China. The fleet became known in the West as the Lay-Osborne [Osborn or
Osbourne] Flotilla and was delivered to the Chinese in the winter of
1864. But when Chinese naval officers attempted to issue orders to
Osborne, he refused to take commands from Chinese officers, demanding that they
come to him directly from the Emperor through Horatio Lay. In what became
known as the Osborne Flotilla Affair, the insulted Chinese Imperial court
returned the vessels in protest and demanded the British liquidate the fleet on
their behalf and remit the payments previously advanced by China.[37]

As the American Civil War was coming to an end, Frederick
Bruce was recalled from China in March 1865, knighted, and now appointed Envoy
Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the United States. The significance of
Sir Bruce’s transfer from China to the U.S. was not immediately evident, nor
openly acknowledged by the Americans until some ten months after his arrival in
Washington. Suddenly on December 28, 1865, the American minister to the Court
of St. James in London delivered a note to the British Foreign Secretary Lord
Clarendon. It contained an acknowledgement of a previously confidential
communication from nearly two years earlier, from February 25, 1864

…signifying to her Majesty’s government the high sense
entertained by that which I have the honor to represent, of the friendly
proceedings of her Majesty’s envoy in China, Sir Frederick Bruce, in regard to
the disposition to be made of the vessels then known as the Osborne flotilla.

And
now the American ambassador was

...instructed to express to your lordship the entire satisfaction of the United
States with the course pursued by Sir Frederick in reference to this matter, as
also in his relations with the government at Washington, and to inform you that
it would be agreeable to it if the views to be presented should find favour
with her Majesty’s government.[38]

This
cryptic note to events of two years earlier in China would not be the last
reference to the Osborne fleet and to American gratitude to the hostile British
in this sudden friendly turn in the dialogue between the United States and
Britain and the said “favour” signaled by the U.S. government to the views of
the new British envoy in Washington.

The reference to the Osborne flotilla throws light onto
Bruce’s previous diplomatic service in China and on his friendship there in
Peking with the American ambassador, the eccentric Anson Burlingame, a Harvard
Law School graduate, a once Know Nothing politician and later a Massachusetts
Republican Congressman who was appointed as ambassador to China by Lincoln in
1861. Later in 1867 Burlingame would resign and accept a position as Imperial
China’s envoy to Washington. He represented China’s interests in the 1868
Burlingame-Seward Treaty with China, which gave Chinese citizens an array of
rights and privileges in the United States, including that of immigration,
until it was reversed by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

Isolated in Peking in 1861 in a small community of European
diplomats the two Anglophone diplomats, “Chinese colleagues” as they would
refer to themselves, found themselves spending a lot of time together, socializing
and visiting each other’s homes and missions. Bruce and Burlingame became
close friends and allies seeing eye-to-eye on what was in the best interests
for both their nations in a unified imperialist policy in China, despite the
‘cold war’ between their two governments elsewhere in the world.

When in 1862 Bruce first proposed the idea of a modern
British-built gunboat fleet for the Chinese emperor to supress the Taiping
Rebellion, Burlingame warmly endorsed the plan to both the European diplomatic community
and to the Chinese. Burlingame furthermore, had developed contacts with
moderate members of the Chinese court, which he put to use in Bruce’s favour.
When in 1864 the Osborne Affair reached its crisis peak, it was Burlingame who
helpfully mediated on behalf of the British through his Chinese contacts,
reaching a mutually acceptable resolution between the British and Chinese.[39]

As the British began to look for a buyer for the surplus
vessels in 1864, both Confederate agents and Japanese naval officials showed
interest in purchasing the fleet. Neither of these two sales would have been
in the interests of the United States and Burlingame turned to the British
envoy for help. Fredrick Bruce now made a very friendly gesture towards the
United States at a very unfriendly time in the relations between the two
countries. Contrary to British policy toward the United States everywhere else
in the world, Bruce blocked all attempts by Confederate agents and the Japanese
to acquire the gunboats and spirited them out of their reach to Bombay at great
British expense. On the way to India, one of the Osborne ships, the Kwantung,
witnessed the CSS Alabama attacking a U.S. vessel in the Straits of Malacca.[40] The Osborne
Flotilla was eventually sold to Egypt.[41]

Bruce’s motives for this friendly act were inspired partly
by his close personal friendship with Burlingame, and partly by the need to
ensure the continuance of U.S. participation in a unified Western imperialist
policy in China. His friendly act was unacknowledged publically at the time
but not forgotten by the Americans and it ‘quietly’ opened welcoming doors for Bruce
when he arrived in Washington in March 1865 at a strategic time when British
American relations needed revisiting as the Civil War was coming to an end.

The Seward-Bruce dinner in “the interest of the two great branches of the
Anglo-Saxon race on opposite sides of the Atlantic…”

On
November 18, 1865 Anson Burlingame was in Washington to accompany his former ‘Chinese
colleague’ Frederick Bruce to a private dinner with William Seward, where the
three of them dined alone. At the dinner Burlingame endorsed and vouched for Bruce’s
friendship to the United States and extolled his actions in China during the
Osborne Flotilla Affair.[42]

Following
that dinner, Bruce reported on his seduction of William Seward and the support
he had garnered from Burlingame, his “Chinese colleague” for a silent détente
with Britain in a despatch to Britain’s new Prime Minister Lord Russell, the
former Foreign Secretary who had just replaced Palmerston after his death that
November

I am certainly making progress in Mr. Seward’s confidence.
This is partly due to the friendly office of Mr. Burlingame and partly to a
feeling on his part that I know his difficulties and do what I can not to
increase them. I feel that the best thing I can do for my country is to make
Seward my friend. The risk of censure for doing too little is a less evil than
the real dangers of doing too much. After a dinner on Saturday to which he
asked me and Burlingame, he spoke with a degree of cordiality and frankness on
all the great questions here, which perfectly astonished my Chinese colleague.

I am very careful to avoid any intimacies
with politicians and to make him feel that it is to him I look for in smoothing
our difficulties. He is touched by this tribute to his position and
influence. The course adopted about the Lay Osborn Flotilla had done much good
and fortunately Burlingame’s presence, who is a sincere friend, admits of the
subject being made the most of. It is a proof not only of our neutrality, but
of our friendship and consideration.

This country is still heaving with the
great excitement produced by the late War. Every passionate impulse, such as
Feniansim, Monroe Doctrine, Canadian annexation, etc, shares in the
effervescence, seeks to take advantage of it. Mr. Seward honestly desires to
tame these wild aspirations he dreads the complications to which they will give
rise and it is of great importance to us, that a man of his moderate temper
should be in so influential a position. No man will do as much in this
direction. He will be able to do more if we leave him the choice of means, of
time, and do not embarrass him with official representations which call for
official replies.[43]

On
the same date Bruce wrote to the new British Foreign Secretary George William
Frederick Villiers, Earl of Clarendon, who had been appointed to the position
on November 5when Russell became Prime Minister. Bruce reported that
William Seward had been doing some seducing of his own at the dinner in the
name of the interests of the Anglo-Saxon race on both sides of the Atlantic

I dined on Saturday the 18th at Mr. Seward’s Mr.
Burlingame my Chinese colleague, being the only other guest. During the course
of the dinner…. he expatiated on the transitory nature of Imperialism as
compared with the Representative system, the former reposing on a man, and the
latter on institutions. That the only race which had shown the capacity to
settle and form new countries was the Saxon race, as helped through the
crucible of English institutions and that the Latin race had failed everywhere
from lack of fibre and self-reliance in the individual and that the interest of
the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race on opposite sides of the
Atlantic was to go together.[44]

The Anglo-American Fenian Containment Plan

Bruce’s
appointment as envoy to Washington had been correctly perceived by the U.S. as
a tentative bid by the British to extend an olive branch; and indeed Bruce’s
mandate from the Foreign Office was to improve relations with the U.S.[45] Now at the
end of December, nearly ten months after Bruce’s arrival in Washington, the
Americans suddenly chose to publicly acknowledge and signal their praise of the
British envoy and his views. What was it that Bruce and Seward came up with in
Washington that inspired the American public note?

As the Fenians argued among themselves and were about to
split into two factions over the issue of whether to invade Ireland directly or
Canada first, Bruce reported to the Foreign Office that, “Seward has urged
strongly the expediency of not making a formal representation about the Fenians
on the grounds that it would reanimate their cause and tend to secure them the
sympathy of those who hate England but have no friendly sentiments towards the
Irish.”[46]

Bruce dispelled suspicions at the Foreign Office that
Seward might be clandestinely backing the Fenians. He assured them that at
worst, Seward might voice “some expression of sympathy with the national
aspirations which underlie the movement, rather than lose for his party the
support of the Irish vote at this critical moment. A declaration so
accompanied would be construed by the Fenians as being favourable to their
cause.”[47]

The Johnson moderate Republican administration was indeed being
tested by critical state elections in New York in the autumn of 1865, followed
by midterm Congressional elections in 1866, in both of which the Democratic
Party, traditionally supported by Irish-Americans, presented a threat to the
electoral balance in Congress key to President Johnson’s control of postwar
Reconstruction policy in the south. It was a complex scenario in which the
Democrats were backing the moderate Republican Johnson in his conflict with
Congress over his Executive control of Reconstruction policy, which many ‘radicals’
in his own Republican Party felt had not been radical enough in its
reconstruction of the defeated South. The problem was not so much in getting
Irish-American votes for the Republicans, as keeping those Democratic Party
incumbents backing Johnson without them fearing that they may lose
Irish-American votes as a result. Johnson’s moderate Republicans had to appear
to be friendly to Irish-American interests or they stood to lose their Democratic
Party allies against Congressional radicals attempting to wrest Reconstruction
policy away from the President and his moderate reconstructionist allies.

Affirming his trust in State Secretary Seward’s sincerity,
Bruce reminded the Foreign Office, “It is to be recollected that Feniansim
represents the lowest part of the Irish Roman Catholic population—the element
which is antagonistic to the Protestant and free Anglo-Saxon race—and their
position is that the abolition of slavery will be followed by the downfall of
the power which under the leadership of the Democrats they wielded while the
North was divided on the subject of slavery.”[48]
The reality, however, was that Feniansim went beyond religious sectarianism: one-third
of the Fenians captured on the Niagara frontier in 1866 during the raids were
going to be Protestants.[49]
Feniansim was a republican movement, not a Catholic sectarian one.

Seward had been very persuasive in describing his hostility
to Feniansim and the Irish in the United States. Bruce reported that Seward
later stated to him that had the British during the war recognized the
Confederacy

….“I myself and every American would have become a
Fenian.” Now he continued, the question presents itself under a different
form. The unity of this country is established beyond dispute, and what it
requires is repose and peace for its complete consolidation. The conduct of
the Irish during the War in spite of their military service, has not rendered
them popular. In point of sentiment they did not show themselves friendly to
Northern ideas, and they went with the Democratic, and not with the Republican
party. If they were strong enough to make the independence of Ireland a
probable result of their enterprise, the irritation against England would acquire
for them considerable moral support, but there is no faith in their success,
and no real sympathy with Celtic aspirations, and the humiliation of England is
not of sufficient interest to the United States, to induce them to ally
themselves with a desperate cause, in the struggle which such an enterprise
would produce.[50]

Bruce urged the Foreign Office to work with the Americans
on the Fenian problem, “I state unhesitatingly my conviction of Mr. Seward’s
language as being bona fide and sincere... I am strengthened in the
opinion that our policy in this harassing business is to act in concert with
Mr. Seward and I am quite prepared to accept the responsibility for adhering to
that course.”[51]

The challenge was how to get Seward to take positive action
on the Fenians. According to Bruce

The President and Seward are at this moment asking for aid
from every quarter in his conflict with Congress. The Democratic party support
him, and the Irish vote has hitherto always been given in favour of the
Democrats. He will therefore shelter himself as long as he can, under the
pretext that there is no violation of the law, and that the affair is not so
serious as it is represented to be. He may hope that the leaders may disagree,
or that something will happen to defeat their plans. But it is evident that
this course keeps the Provinces on the qui vive, that it paralyses
trading relations on the frontier, and that it allows these agitators to do
their wont. On the other hand, it excites much hostility in the provinces,
towards the United States, and the internal state of the country and of
parties, is such as to render it more easy for us to deal vigorously with these
brigands without a rupture between the two countries, than it would be if the
country were united and tranquil.[52]

Bruce’s advice to adopt a policy of cooperation in silence
with the United States against the Fenians was explicitly approved in London by
mid-November on the eve of the Seward Bruce dinner, by Foreign Secretary Clarendon
and Prime Minister Russell. Any lingering thoughts that Bruce might have
‘improvised’ or ‘cobbled together’ this policy without express direction from
London can be dismissed. The decision was thought strategically important
enough to include a briefing of Queen Victoria.[53]Bruce was
instructed on November 16

Her Majesty’s Government approve the
manner in which you have dealt with this question, and so long as they can
obtain by friendly and unofficial communication with the American Minister the
security of the British Provinces from outrages originating with persons
seeking to produce confusion and to imperil the friendly relations between
Great Britain and the United States, they have no desire to remonstrate
officially with that government on the subject... Her Majesty’s Government
will not, at all events for the present, require you to make an official
representation to the United States Government on these matters, but while
instructing you to watch the utmost vigilance the proceedings of the Fenian
conspirators to which I have alluded, Her Majesty’s Government are content to
leave with you full discretion as to the manner of dealing with the matter in
your communications with the United States Government and are prepared to
approve you either in continuing to treat the question confidentially with Mr. Sewardor,
if you are anxious to do so, in making it the subject of official remonstrance.[54]

Frederick Bruce and U.S. President Andrew Johnson: dissatisfaction with the
Irish “imperium in imperio” in the United States

Clarendon
instructed Bruce to go over Seward’s head and meet directly in private with U.S.
President Andrew Johnson and ensure that in response to the British silence on
the issue, bona fide action will be taken by the U.S. to contain Fenian
threats to Canada.

This is a meeting that in Fenian historiography is
described only by Leon Ó Broin in Fenian Fever: An Anglo-American Dilemma. William
D’Arcy’s extraordinarily detailed history of American Feniansim overlooks it
entirely as does Brian Jenkins’ authoritative Fenians and Anglo-American
Relations, an unusual oversight considering the significance of any
one-on-one meeting between a British envoy and an American President. It is
possible that D’Arcy and Jenkins simply missed it on the record, as the meeting
was unofficial, but it took place just the same, on February 8, 1866 and is
reported in academic literature on the British perception of Johnson’s
Reconstruction policy.[55]

The meeting was arranged by James Dixon, a Republican
Senator for Connecticut and a confidant of Johnson’s. Some deception was
involved for the private audience, as Bruce reported in his despatch to
Clarendon, “In conformity to my understanding with Mr. Dixon, we called on the
ladies of the Whitehouse last evening, and after a short time the President
joined us.”

According to Bruce’s report, the first thing Johnson
did when greeting him, “He alluded in a very friendly spirit to my conduct in
the Osbourne flotilla affair, and said that my position as a friend to this
country was thoroughly understood and appreciated, that he himself was anxious
to see friendly relations existing with England, and did not wish to rely
exclusively on reports of what passed between me and the Secretary of State.”[56]

Johnson assured Bruce that the Fenian movement “met with no
sympathy on the part of the Government, which on the contrary was anxious to
discourage it, that he was much dissatisfied with the imperium in imperio the
Irish wished to create in this country, that the attempt to combine particular
nationalities on this continent was contrary to American interests and
inconsistent with their duties as American citizens...” Bruce reported that
Johnson “dwelt on the inconsistency of the Irish who, while invoking aid on
their own behalf as an oppressed race, were themselves the most bitter
opponents of all attempts to improve and elevate the condition of the Negro in
the United States.”[57]

Although still unsure of Seward’s commitment and worried
how he will react to this private meeting with the President, Bruce concluded
that he was satisfied with Johnson’s commitment to prevent any Fenian attacks
on the British provinces and that the President was “our best friend in the
administration.”[58]

Bruce had been instructed by Clarendon to tell President
Johnson that except for intercepting raids against Canada or other provinces,
the British government now preferred that U.S. authorities not interfere
with any Fenian meetings or its organization. To do so would risk healing the
currently widening schism splitting the movement between the “Ireland First”
faction and “Canadian” faction.[59]
As for intercepting any Fenian sorties into Canada, the British offered to
discreetly share their intelligence with the Americans on Fenian arms purchases
and movements inside the United States towards the frontier, without lodging
official complaints, allowing the U.S. to act against the Fenians on its own—“as
propio motu for the vindication of international obligations”—rather
than appearing to be responding to requests from Her Majesty’s Government.[60] This would
be a good fit with the administration’s concerns with the Irish-American
vote.

As for the U.S. Secretary of State, Clarendon’s instruction
to Bruce was for him to pacify him by informing “Seward confidentially that he
was not being written to, because it would be embarrassing to him either to
send a bunkum answer that would please the Irish, or a curt answer that would
annoy the British, but he was being relied upon to take real and bona fide
measures to prevent Fenian follies from assuming the form of active outrage.”[61]

Testing the new friendship – the February 1866 Fenian Crisis in Ireland

The meeting
with President Johnson occurred precisely as, perhaps even due to, the British preparations
to suspend habeas corpus in Ireland and carry out mass arrests of
American-Irish Fenians who had been returning to Ireland since the end of the
Civil War. As expected, when habeas corpus was suspended on February
17, 1866, it immediately triggered a conflict with Seward over Britain’s Home
Office insistence on the indefeasibility of allegiance to the Crown of
British-born subjects now naturalized as American citizens. This issue would
test the effectiveness of the understanding just arrived at several weeks
earlier.[62]

Seward insisted that U.S. naturalization “completely
absolves the person complying with it, from foreign allegiance, whoever may
have been his sovereign, and invests him with the right, equally with native
born citizens, to such protection and care of the Government of the United
States as it can, in conformity with treaties and the law of nations, extend
over him, wherever he may sojourn, whether in the land of his nativity, or in
any other foreign country.”[63]

Bruce immediately assessed this question as a potential
deal-breaker for the Americans

In order to appreciate the importance given to this pretension of the
Americans, it is necessary to bear in mind the enormous and increasing foreign
emigration to these shores. They take a deep interest in this claim to
protection, and the native Americans support it, as a sine qua non condition of
their support in elections.

I cannot conceal from myself the gravity
of this question at the present crisis, and the unfortunate influence that will
be produced on public opinion here, if the Fenians are able to present
themselves to the American people, as denied the privileges of American
citizenship in this respect.[64]

Seward in his protest to the British, backhandedly referred to the recent
agreement not to publicly dispute over the Fenian problem

….[not] to have it known that a serious debate has occurred upon it between the
United States and Great Britain, without any good prospect of a peaceful and
friendly settlement. It is for Her Majesty’s Government to consider whether,
the occasion which brings up the question is the most suitable one, and whether
some other occasion and time might not be more convenient for treating the
question.[65]

Eager
to sustain the recent agreement, the British Foreign Office acquiesced to
Seward’s position and discreetly pressured the Home Office to release at the
U.S. State Department’s request, both naturalized and native-born Irish Americans
held in Ireland under the Suspension of Habeas Corpus Act, on the
condition of their immediate return to the U.S.[66] In his
instructions to Bruce on this question, Clarendon expressed his hope that this
“would prevent any difference between Her Majesty’s Government and that of the
United States upon a question involving a principle the discussion of which, in
connection with Feniansim, it would be desirable not to enter upon.”[67] [My
emphasis.]

This joint silence produced results. By May 25, the
British had acceded to every State Department request for the release of
American citizens held in Ireland under suspension of habeas corpus,
except in two instances.[68]In return, the U.S. was expected to make bona fide efforts to
contain any attempts by the Fenian Brotherhood to foray across the border into
Canada or any other of the British provinces.

Thus in March 1866, two months before the Fenian invasion
on the Niagara frontier, the U.S. government in public appeared not to be
responding to the growing Fenian threat against Canada, and perhaps even
tacitly sponsoring it.

Meanwhile the British government appeared to its opposition
in Parliament and to the colonial provincial Canadians as not protesting
vigorously enough the American “inaction” on the Fenian threat to Canada.[69]

But behind closed doors Britain and the U.S. were working closely
together through Seward’s State Department to contain the Fenians without
exposing Johnson’s administration to the vicissitude of the Irish-American vote
or exposing their collaboration to the Fenians—something neither the British
nor the Americans wanted revealed.

Canadian Suspicions

The
Canadians and even Governor General Lord Monck were apparently not informed of
the Anglo-American plan, and came close several times to wrecking Bruce’s
strategy by vigorously and publicly complaining through the Governor General
about British diplomatic inaction on the invasion threat and making repeated
demands on Bruce in Washington that some form of official protestation be
lodged with the U.S. government on behalf of Canada.[70]

Ogle Gowan, the former Grand Master and founder of the
Orange Order in Canada, quickly picked up the scent of the agreement in current
U.S. policy, although he had no idea that the British were in on it nor did he
fully grasp its scope or intent. Gowan had a robust private Orange
intelligence network of his own in New York State going back to 1837.[71] On March
19, he wrote to John A. Macdonald that a reliable source in Albany (whom Gowan
claimed he knew since “infancy”) had reported

There is a perfect understanding between Mr. Seward and two
of the Fenian Chiefs. That they (the Fenians) are to be allowed to carry on
all the preparations they please and to keep up as much excitement as they
please, so as to frighten the Canadian Government and compel them (the
Government) to keep up a strong force to guard against apprehended danger—that
this course will incur a fearful expenditure and will force us to increase our
Taxes, so as to prevent inducements to smuggling, [sic] and in the end,
lead to a general wish for Annexation, to prevent the continuance
of excitement and increasing Taxes. He says, Mr. Seward has agreed that they
may do anything they please short only of actual invasion.[72]

The U.S. Army and General Grant’s “Directions in regard to the Fenian
invasion of Canada” March 12, 1866

A week
before Gowan sat down to write of his suspicions, General Ulysses S. Grant,
U.S. Army General-in-Chief, had already issued orders on March 12 that Fenians
were to be prevented from invading Canada, but explicitly prohibited
interference with any other Fenian activities. Coinciding with a favourable
course of action in Ireland on the question of American citizens held there,
this must have been perceived as a new turn in policy by the U.S. Army, because
Grant felt it necessary to comment in a preamble to his orders, “During our
late troubles neither the British Government or the Canadian officials gave
themselves much trouble to prevent hostilities being organized against the
United States from their possessions. But two wrongs never make a right and it
is our duty to prevent wrong on the part of our people.”[73]

It took three days for the order to be distributed to the
U.S. Army commanders on the Canadian border in the form of the following March
15 circular issued more than a month before the Campobello Fenian raid
in April, and three months before the Niagara frontier invasion in June:

Directions in regard to the Fenian invasion of Canada

The Commanding General directs that you, with your command, use all vigilance
to prevent armed or hostile forces, or organizations, from leaving the United
States to enter the British provinces. It is not proposed to interfere with
Fenian meetings, within the United States, but as the intentions of the
Brotherhood seem to be very public, their proceedings should be closely
watched, and advantage taken of this publicity, to thwart such intention, if
their object be to organize in the United States for the purpose of making War
upon a foreign power with who we are at peace.[74]

The
scope and nature of the Anglo-American Fenian containment policy is clearly
evident in copies of some of Seward’s subsequent correspondence. While Seward
might have culled his own papers on this subject, they survived in tertiary
files, like those of the U.S. Secretary of War who had been receiving relevant
copies of them.[75]
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton who was no friend of Johnson’s or Seward’s,
chose to retain what could been in the future very embarrassing if revealed to
the Irish-American electorate. Whatever deceptive posturing Seward might have
indulged in for the benefit of visiting Fenian envoys or British diplomats for
that matter, in the inner corridors of the government, Seward by the end of
March was clearly pursuing a bona fide aggressive policy to contain the
Fenian threat not only at Campobello, but as well in the Lake Champlain region
and in particular the one arising in the city of Buffalo and he continued to do
so through April and May.

William Seward on the Buffalo Fenians – April 1866

Among
the War Secretary’s correspondence is a copy of a letter from Seward to U.S.
Attorney General James Speed written on April 2, still several weeks before the
Campobello raid materialized in its full dimensions. Seward issued a detailed
and decisive memorandum describing enormous weapon shipments arriving at an
auction house on 20-22 Pearl Street in Buffalo belonging to Patrick O’Day, the
Fenian “centre” [chief] in Buffalo. Seward enumerated the Fenian strength and
named several prominent Fenian captains in the city and accused the Buffalo
police of being in “full sympathy with them.”

Pointing out significantly that “the subject has engaged
the attention of the President” Seward warned “these incidents are occurring
simultaneously with proceedings of popular meetings held in various parts of
the country.” Seward demanded the Attorney General instruct his attorneys and
marshals “to be vigilant in preventing any violation of the neutrality laws,
and in bringing before the courts of justice, all persons who may be found to
have engaged in such unlawful attempts.”[76]

On the same day, U.S. Army units deployed on the Canadian
border received explicit orders to seize Fenian weapons and prevent any attempt
by Fenians to “make war” on Canada.[77]
Three days later the U.S. Army in Oswego, NY, successfully seized three cases
of Fenian rifles stored in a barn and attempted to seize an additional 500
rifles thought to be secreted at another location.[78] All this
early activity was not a reaction to the signs of preparation for the raid on
Campobello, but of Seward’s intention to unroll a systematic and aggressive
cordon everywhere between the Fenians and the British provinces. There is
nothing ‘ambiguous’ or ‘ambivalent’ in these U.S. government containment
attempts, nor in Seward’s ceaseless nagging over the next few months that the
Fenians be stopped.[79]

That
Sir Frederick Bruce was the primary source of intelligence for the U.S. Army on
Fenian movement is logical—the Americans did not appropriate much of their own
resources for their surveillance or at least did not admit to it. U.S. Army
correspondence on weapons seizures confirms that information was “furnished the
Secretary of State by Sir Frederick Bruce, British Minister, relative to
munitions of war forwarded to points along the northern frontier.”[80]

It was only by sheer luck when researching this question
that I recalled having read similar passages in William Seward’s correspondence
as collected by the War Department Secretary in the U.S. archives and a passage
in John A. Macdonald’s secret service correspondence from a month earlier in
Canadian archives, that I suddenly caught sight of the scope of British
willingness to share Canadian intelligence with the Americans.

In his April 2 memo to the Attorney General, Seward claimed
his source on the Buffalo Fenians was a letter “submitted to this Department
which was written confidentially by a well known, intelligent, and loyal
citizen of Buffalo, on the 19thultimo [March]to an
officer of the government.”[81]

Seward is partly covering up the source: the informant was
no “citizen” of Buffalo and Seward neglects to mention to which
government the informant had written.

Seward’s information as given in that memo, almost word for
word, came directly from a report submitted to John A. Macdonald on March 19 by
Alexander McLeod. A retired Canadian sheriff, McLeod had been residing in
Buffalo since November 1864, where he worked during the week while returning to
his home across the river in Clifton (Niagara Falls) on weekends. By
‘coincidence’ McLeaud found himself employed in the U.S. as a bookkeeper in Fenian
Patrick O’Day’s auction house.[82]
McLeod was Macdonald’s personal secret agent reporting directly to him, deep
inside the Buffalo Fenian circle and working outside of Canadian secret service
chief Gilbert McMicken’s vast network of Canada West Frontier Constabulary
undercover operatives.[83]

McLeod Curriculum Vitae: Canada-New York Border History 1837-1866

Alexander
McLeod was indeed “well known” to William Seward, a long time upper New York
State attorney and anti-slavery politician, a former New York Governor, U.S.
Senator and one of the founders of the Republican Party. In an obscure
September 1837 incident yet to be adequately described by Canadian historians,
Alexander McLeod makes his appearance in history as a deputy-sheriff for
Niagara Falls District who executed a rendition order back to the U.S. of an
escaped slave from Tennessee by the name of Solomon Mosely [Molesby Moseby] who
was facing charges of stealing his owner’s horse during his escape.

Canonical Canadian history prefers to acclaim Canada as a
welcoming place for escaped African American slaves, but that had not always
been the case. In a 1919 account of the incident, legal-social historian and
Ontario Supreme Court Justice William Renwick Riddell writes

The people of color of the Niagara region made Mosely’s
case their own and determined to prevent his delivery up to the American
authorities… Under the leadership of Herbert [Hubbard] Holmes, a yellow man,
[bi-racial] a teacher and a preacher, they lay around the jail night and day to
the number of from two to four hundred to prevent the prisoner’s delivery up.[84]

When the time came to deliver the escaped slave to the U.S.
by ferry across the Niagara River, McLeod rode out of the jail with his
prisoner in a wagon escorted by a company of troops. As they rode toward the
ferry dock, Holmes led a large rescue party which surrounded the escort in an
attempt to free Mosely by force. McLeod ordered the troops to open fire.
Holmes was shot dead while a black male, Jacob Green, was bayonetted to death.
Mosely in the meantime managed to escape in the confusion and eventually made
his way safely to England. A corner’s inquiry into the death of Holmes and
Green concluded that McLeod acted properly as an “officer of the law.” Riddle
concluded his account, “No proceedings were taken against the deputy sheriff;
but a score or more of the people of color were arrested and placed in prison
for a time. The troublous times of the Mackenzie Rebellion came on, the men of
color were released, many of them joining a Negro militia company which took
part in protecting the border.”[85]

Once the 1837 Mackenzie Rebellion in Upper Canada began,
McLeod became even more familiar a historical figure for his role in the
suppression of the rebels. Then in 1838 he discovered the location of the Caroline,
an American vessel supplying the Mackenzie rebels holding Navy Island in
the Niagara River. Guided by McLeod’s intelligence, a Canadian raiding party
crossed into the U.S. and set the Caroline afire, killing in the process
one of its American crew, Amos Durfee of Buffalo.

Nearly a year and a half later, with the crisis in Canada
over, on November 1840 while McLeod was visiting Lewiston, NY, on unrelated
routine business, he was unexpectedly arrested by New York State authorities
and indicted for arson and murder, although physically he had nothing to do
with the actual raid on the Caroline.

McLeod’s fate and the “Caroline Affair” became an
international issue as Britain’s Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston demanded his
release and threatened retaliation if McLeod was convicted and executed. While
authorities in Washington desired to comply with Palmerston’s demands, New York
State refused to yield its jurisdiction over the case and proceeded to trial.[86]Seward who
was the Whig Governor of New York at the time and backed the Whig
administration in Washington, confidentially promised the British that he would
pardon McLeod should he be convicted by the New York court.[87] In the end,
Seward’s intervention would not be necessary as McLeod, after his case received
a change of venue from the Buffalo area and went to trial in Troy, NY, was
subsequently acquitted in 1841 and returned to Canada. Afterward McLeod
continued visiting and working in New York State.

Indeed McLeod was “well known” to Seward.

“Delenda est Carthago” Canadian Intelligence on the Buffalo Fenians

McLeod
appears to have become employed as the auction house bookkeeper in the Buffalo
Fenian headquarters by really by sheer coincidence, and at first paid “little
attention to its movements—I had no belief that the leaders would be so insane
as to attempt to send armed men to Ireland or make this threatened attack on
Canada.”[88]
But in February 1866, McLeod became alarmed by the arrival of weapons at
O’Day’s Auction Room and by the plans he had overheard there. On February 28
he first contacted John Simpson,[89]
the former police commissioner and mayor of Clifton.[90] Simpson
referred McLeod to Macdonald to whom he would now report directly, producing a
stream of detailed and accurate intelligence on the preparations of the Fenians
and their activities in Buffalo.[91]

In that March 19 report to Macdonald to which Seward
alluded, McLeod correctly warned that although the Fenians were not going to
strike in the immediate future as had been feared, the Fenian invasion plan was
continuing to gain momentum. McLeod prefaced his report with an erudite Latin
quotation, “The cry is still for war. Delenda est Carthago”—(“Carthage
must be destroyed”)—a reference to the clamour raised in the Roman Senate by
Cato the Elder which led to the tawdry Third Punic War and the unnecessary
destruction of Carthage by the Romans in 146 B.C.

McLeod stated that there were over 1,000 stands of muskets
currently hidden in O’Day’s auction house and that he saw enough empty cases
piled up there from weapons and equipment secreted in other places in Buffalo
to arm a force of 5,000 Fenians.[92]
Later McLeod ominously reported, “These are all new muskets and all good...
there came out from the large drill room that is near P. O’Day’s store, where
one hundred men drill with ease, forty eight rank and file with a captain at
their head fit to take them any place and I was astonished to see those men go
through their drill as easy as if they were drinking a glass, their double
quick and charge brought applause, it seems the whole city encourages them on.”[93]

On April 25 after being warned he was exposed and the
Fenians were threatening to abduct him, McLeod hastily returned to Canada but
would continue taking on risky intelligence gathering missions across the river
in Buffalo and the Niagara region.[94]
C.P. Stacey is convinced that McCloud was receiving a secret pension during
this period.[95]
After the crisis, McLeod would be awarded in 1866 for his services to Macdonald
with an appointment as a Justice of the Peace in Welland County.[96]

The timing of McLeod’s March 19 letter and Seward’s April 2reference to it perfectly fits the chronology in the resolution of the
allegiance-citizenship dispute between Seward and the British foreign office.
It also reflects the time it likely would have taken for the Canadians to
dispatch a copy of McLeod’s letter to the British Colonial or Foreign Office
and for them to subsequently forward it to Bruce in Washington who then shared
it with Seward. Macdonald as a colonial provincial official would not have had
direct communication with Bruce or Seward and apparently was not privy to the
agreement between the British and the U.S. to share intelligence.[97] This
sharing with Seward of what appears to have been an unredacted copy of
Macdonald’s secret correspondence, along with the identity of his personal
secret agent working deep inside the Fenian headquarters in Buffalo, is an
extraordinary display of trust between the British and Americans—at least in
the fight against Irish insurgent nationalism—and ironically an act of betrayal
of both the Fenians and arguably the Canadians as well.

The Fenian Raids of 1866 and the U.S. Neutrality Proclamation

On
April 19, when the Fenians actually made their attempt in New Brunswick, U.S.
Navy vessels promptly intercepted the Campobello raiders soon after their
operation began and dispersed any further Fenian attempts. The same thing
would inevitably happen to the Fenian invasion of Canada in June but not with
any visible immediacy. Five days would pass before President Johnson
issued his neutrality proclamation, condemning the Fenians and publically
ordering the U.S. Army to intercept their operations into Canada. This
lateness obviously added to the fuelled rumours that Johnson had approved the
invasion and was stalling in the hope that the Fenians would be successful. In
fact, however, the U.S. Army had moved earlier without waiting for a
proclamation and had been actively attempting to contain the Fenians since
March.

General George G. Meade, for example, reported on March 31,
“I have directed the seizure of any arms, munitions or other articles of
contraband of war, which are being collected on the frontier with a view to
equipping forces for the invasion of Canada.”[98]

Once
the Fenians made their move across the frontier on June 1, U.S. Army units
under Meade began almost immediately moving in and sealing selected border
points, patrolling, rounding up Fenians, disarming and arresting them and
preventing further incursions into Canada as best as they could,
considering the enormous length of the frontier. On June 2, the following U.S.
Army deployments were hastily made in the U.S. Army’s Department of the East:
nine companies to Buffalo, one to Fort Niagara, one to Oswego, one to Sackets
Harbor, three to Ogdensburg, five to St. Albans and a company from Erie Pa., in
the Department of the Middle, was detached to the East.[99]

President Johnson did not issue a public proclamation
against the Fenians because he had not been asked to by the person privy
to the ‘silent containment’ agreement: Frederick Bruce. With no response
requested, Johnson and Seward continued to act in silent deference to
Irish-American public opinion, as it had been agreed they could.

By June 5, three days into the Fenian raid at Niagara
everybody had measured the scope of their failures and options on both sides of
the border. The deciding factor for the British was the continued assembly of
Fenians along the Canadian border from Buffalo to Vermont. Bruce couriered to
Seward a note that now urged a proclamation from the U.S. Government,
condemning the raids and warning people not to join them.

In it, Bruce advised that Seward should not “underrate the
good effect it would produce,” and in closing, reassured Seward that as per
their understanding, “This is ‘private’—but I tell you how these points strike
me.”[100]
The next day a Presidential proclamation fully condemning the illegality of the
Fenians was issued. It was the beginning of the end for the Fenian invasion of
Canada and ended among them all lingering illusions, or delusions, that the
United States government was somehow sanctioning their foray into Canada or
tacitly looking the other way.

Betrayal of the Fenians

The
Fenians felt treacherously betrayed by these interventions. As the lyrics of
an 1866 song ‘The Fenian Volunteer’, attest

The muskets were purchased at Bridesburg Arsenal,
Philadelphia, and the ammunition at Watervelt Arsenal, Troy [New York]. The
United States Government, in selling these stores to my agents was perfectly
aware of the purpose for which they were intended, and their willingness in
allowing these sales to be made, together with the sympathy expressed for us by
individuals in eminent positions in Washington, caused me to be totally
unprepared for the treacherous seizure of our arms and ammunition...[102]

If there was a U.S. government conspiracy, then it had been
with the British against the Fenians, not with them. The understanding
allowing the Americans to use British intelligence discreetly without Britain
lodging formal demands for U.S. action created the illusion of American
indifference, interpreted by the Fenians, the press, the Canadians and
subsequently by generations of historians as collusion between the U.S. and the
Fenians. The sincere sense of betrayal expressed by the Fenians afterwards,
only further heightened in observers’ perceptions the appearance of ambiguity
in American policy and in Seward’s conduct.

After the Fenian invasion, Bruce assessed the collaboration
he pursued with the U.S. as a success, writing on July 22, “I think by acting
entirely in concert with Seward in Fenianism, Canadian provinces, etc., some
difficulties, and those not inconsiderable, have been avoided, and the tone of
this Govt in its communications has sensibly improved.”[103]

This Anglo-American understanding would also facilitate the
smooth handling of the thorny issue of what to do with American Fenians
captured in Canada during their raid. Many were condemned to death by Canadian
courts in the autumn of 1866, but the sentences were then quietly commuted by
John A. Macdonald. Except for one who died in prison, they
were all quietly released between 1869 and 1872, with the last, David Whalen,
emerging on July 26, 1872.[104]

Seward and the Fenians: the lingering doubts and loose ends…

Nonetheless,
a conclusion with complete certainty on Seward’s relationship with the Fenians
remains an elusive quest because of small anomalies that continue to linger
around this question of his possible complicity. Even the new evidence
introduced here of Seward’s proactive policy to sweep the frontier free of
Fenian threats, is typically not free of contradictions.

Those rifles seized by the U.S. Army in Oswego were ordered
to be returned to the Fenians on May 28, at the height of their mobilization
nearby in Buffalo, only three days before the invasion began.[105] The order
originated from the notorious General Joseph Hooker, then commander of the
Department of the East headquartered in New York City and it countermanded
previous standing orders not to release the rifles to their claimant in Oswego,
Patrick Regan, who was trying to recover them with a bond and an affidavit
claiming they did not belong to the Fenian Brotherhood.[106]

But in the end, the U.S. Army commander at Oswego refused
to obey Hooker’s orders resulting in an investigation for insubordination that
ended inconclusively a year later.[107]
The traditional ‘rogue faction’ conspiracy model could take centre stage here,
although Hooker is not known to have any connections or particular sympathy to
the Irish cause and was in fact unwell by the time he issued that order,
suffering from a stroke. In August he would be transferred to the U.S. Army
Department of the Lakes headquartered in Detroit and soon after retired.

The March 12th orders quoted above from General
Grant on containment of the Fenians[108]
took three days before they were circulated[109]
because a subordinate officer chose to strangely drag his feet, “in absence of
the Major General commanding [Meade]...I have not thought it advisable to take
other action, than to give the Commanding Officer...as closely as possible the
views of the Lieutenant General [Grant] in a letter...”[110]

Despite it being well known that Fenian plans called for
the mobilization of thousands of Fenians against the Canadian frontier, on
March 31 Meade complained to Grant that

There are only 357 officers and men, on the frontier of the
State of New York, and none on the frontiers of N. Hampshire, Vermont, and
Maine, conterminous with the boundary lines of Canada and New Bruswicke [sic]...
if an invasion of Canada is seriously attempted in any force by the Fenians I
do not see how the Commanding General of the Department of the East, without
very considerable reinforcements, can offer any opposition.[111]

In the same letter requesting reinforcements, Meade also
urged, “the position of the Government should be made known and the fact made
public, that all acts tending to a violation of neutrality will be
discountenanced.” Apparently the Anglo-American agreement was sufficiently
secret that Meade, one of only five Military Division commanders in the United
States, reporting directly to the General-in-Chief, was not privy to its
secrecy.[112]
On April 5, Meade received his answer, “No troops are at present available to
reinforce the troops on that frontier.”[113]
Bruce would report that by June 4, U.S. Army strength on the border from Maine
to New York had been increased to only 1,200 troops.[114]

During the April Fenian raid at New Brunswick, the very
person who accused Seward of being “very chary” on the Fenians, Gideon Welles,
refused to order the navy to seize a vessel laden with arms on the way to the
Fenians gathering at Campobello on the technicality that it was not the
responsibility of the Secretary of the Navy to issue such orders, and Seward
and Stanton as well sheltered their departments from taking responsibility to
stop the Fenians. In the end, the Treasury Department issued the orders
through the Collector of Customs at Eastport, Maine.[115] This,
however, is more likely about avoiding political secretarial responsibility for
action against the Fenians, than evidence of conspiracy to allow them to go
forward, but nonetheless the question calls for further research. All these
‘loose ends’ however, still nag at the Seward-Fenian paradox, confounding
attempts to conclusively resolve it.

The Fenian Raids: Canadian Intelligence Failure or Deliberate Strategy:
The MacDougall Plan

In May 1866, the
Fenians began to actively mobilize for the invasion of
Canada and it should not have been a surprise when they sallied across the
border. Despite having received numerous reports
throughout the month of large groups of Fenians moving by train toward the
border, Canadian authorities failed to act in what
appears as a colossal intelligence failure. In fact, Canada had spent too much money
and exhausted too much of the volunteers’ goodwill on false alerts; they had ‘cried wolf’ once too often.

Macdonald had called out the militia for emergency frontier duty twice, in November 1865 and March 1866. Ogle
Gowan adequately described the impact the Fenian feints at invasion were having
in his suspicions of Seward’s collusion with the Fenians to drain British
resources in Canada. These alerts were expensive and caused
enormous disruptions in the labour supply, commerce, and business, and in the
personal lives and careers of the young volunteers and their officers.[116]Had the Fenians come, these disruptions would have been forgiven, but the
invasion had not materialized. It appeared to many that the Fenian plans were
all talk and bluster.

Did Canadian
secret service chief Gilbert McMicken and his Frontier Constabulary fail in assessing the urgency of the Fenian
threat that May? Many historians point out how in the final month before the invasion, Macdonald, McMicken, D’Arcy
McGee, and many others were convinced that the Fenians were on the brink of
extinction.[117]The phenomenon that the Canadians were experiencing is known
in military intelligence as “conditioning,” when after numerous feints by an
enemy, deliberate or not, the defender no longer is able or willing to
recognize a real attack when it comes.[118] The Fenians
had announced their invasion plans so many times that Mark Twain would later
comment, “A regiment of Fenians will fill the whole world with the noise of it
when they are getting ready to invade Canada.”[119]

It should be noted, however, that
Canada’s Militia Adjutant-General
Colonel Patrick L. MacDougall had been arguing since the first alert in
November 1865 for a defence policy that involved assembling the volunteers at
strategic centres away from the frontier after a Fenian landing and then
launching focused counterattacks, rather than rushing the militia blindly to
the immense frontier at every rumour of their approach.[120]
McMicken strongly opposed this strategy, arguing that if the Fenians were
allowed to penetrate Canadian territory “it would raise an excitement in the
United States very difficult to control.”[121]MacDougall
did not get his way during the second Fenian scare in March 1866, when
volunteers were again called out and deployed to the frontier needlessly. But
in the wake of the March alarm and its renewed financial and political costs,
it appeared that MacDougall’s argument would prevail. No troops would be
called out and deployed until the day the Fenians actually began moving on to
the border.

McMicken would later vehemently hold the
military chain of command responsible for allowing the Fenians to penetrate
Canadian territory, writing to Macdonald, “Are you aware that I telegraphed Gen
Napier [British Military Commander for Canada West] on 30th May suggesting
the propriety of sending a force to Port Colborne? Had he done this perhaps all
would have been well, but I believe he was at some Lady fair’s [sic]
when he got my telegram and putting it in his pocket probably never saw it or
even thought of it again.”[122]

In the last week of May, spies and
newspapers were reporting the arrival by train of hundreds of Fenians at
Buffalo from Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and even from as far as
Louisiana. The men arrived in regimental groups but in civilian clothing and
unarmed. Upon arrival they were barracked and armed by the Buffalo Fenians. Other
Fenian units were slowly arriving in Malone and Ogdensburg, New York; at St.
Albans, Vermont; at Cape Vincent; Oswego; Rochester; and other points along the
Upper St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario. But only at Buffalo were their numbers
significant; everywhere else the flow of volunteers was a sluggish trickle.[123]At some critical launching points, such as Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland,
there was hardly any Fenian mobilization at all.

In the end, when the time came to act, many of the Fenian
volunteers that Sweeny was counting on failed to appear.

The Fenian Invasion “Yankee-doodle twaddle”

The problem for the Fenians was not their plan, but its hasty and
disorganized execution by a faction-torn movement that had over the years made so many futile calls for action. When
the genuine call came, many refused to believe it. Ironically, they were
hindered by the same ‘cry wolf’ that conditioned Canada’s leaders to
stand down the militia at this critical moment. The Civil War had been over
for fourteen months now, and many Fenian veterans had
settled down. After so many false starts, they were not as ready to drop
everything as they might have been earlier. There was also a distinctly
cavalier and undisciplined culture among American Fenians compared with that of
the Irish revolutionaries back home.[124] The Roberts
Wing leadership was not the same hardened generation of rebel Irish exiles that the original founders O’Mahony and Stephens represented. O’Mahony would comment on his
own American Fenians, “I am sick of Yankee-doodle twaddle, Yankee-doodle
selfishness and all Yankee doodledum! It is refreshing to turn to the stern
front and untiring constancy of the continental apostles of liberty.”[125]

When in the
last week of May Fenian forces in Cleveland failed to secure the necessary
boats to cross Lake Erie, Sweeny ordered those units to deploy to Buffalo
instead.[126]Claiming to be migrant railway workers, the Fenians avoided surveillance at
the Buffalo central station by having their trains slow down on the outskirts,
jumping off, and making the rest of the journey into the city on foot.[127]

At 11:55 P.M. on May 30, the General-in-Chief of the U.S. Army,
Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, warned Major General George G. Meade,
commander of the Military Division of the Atlantic, that the Mayor of Buffalo
had telegraphed that six hundred Fenians were on the way from Cleveland to join
those already assembling in Buffalo. Seward had intercepted orders for Fenians
headed to St. Albans to prepare to move on Canada. Meade was ordered to “take
the best steps you can to prevent these expeditions from leaving the United
States.”[128]

Sweeny now had to act before U.S.
authorities shut down his operation completely. Despite the fact that the
Fenian forces had not assembled as planned on the other points of the frontier,
or perhaps to inspire them to mobilize faster, Sweeny transferred the Fenians
assembled in Cleveland over to Buffalo (as Grant had warned Meade) and
telegraphed the attack code: “You may commence work.”[129]What was originally intended as a diversionary prong suddenly became the main
invasion force.

When Fenian General William F. Lynch
failed to appear at Cleveland to lead the invasion from
Buffalo, Sweeny turned at the last minute to the most
senior available Fenian officer in the vicinity, a former U.S. cavalry captain, the Fenian
Colonel John O’Neillcommanding the Thirteenth Fenian Regiment of Nashville, Tennessee. O’Neill had arrived from Tennessee by train with his men the
day before.[130]Sweeny promoted O’Neill to brigadier general and put him in command of the invasion on the Niagara
Frontier.

Sabotaging the USS Michigan

So many Fenians had now assembled in Buffalo, that on May 31, the
U.S. Attorney there, William A. Dart, alerted the navy gunboat USS Michigan at
Buffalo, and ordered the
closing of the port to outbound traffic between 4 P.M. and 9 A.M. and
prohibiting in other hours any outbound traffic without first being inspected
by U.S. Customs.[131]The Michigan was a
formidable vessel, armed with a 64-pounder eight-inch pivot gun, a 30-pounder
Parrott rifled gun, six 24-pounder Dahlgren smoothbore howitzers, five 20-pounder
Parrott rifles, and two 12-pounder Dahlgren boat howitzers.[132] It had the capacity to blow any Fenian invasion out of
the water, any Fenian crossing into Canada; but it did not, further fueling
rumours of U.S. government complicity in the invasion. What happened there is
yet another lost story lurking in the archives of the United States Navy that
can now be told.

Almost everyone in authority on both
the Canadian and U.S. sides were still stubbornly refusing to believe the warnings of a Fenian
buildup until the anti-Fenian Mayor of Buffalo, Chandler
J. Wells, and U.S. Attorney William Dart began telegraphing urgent alerts
to the mayors of Hamilton and Toronto on May 31.[133]
As thousands of Fenians converged on Buffalo behind him, O’Neill suddenly took
a force of about a thousand men across the Niagara River into Canada in the
early morning hours of June 1. Over the next eight hours several hundred more
Fenians would follow, raising the final number of insurgents crossing into
Canada to anywhere between 1,250, and 1,500. The Michigan, despite
having been put on alert,sat helplessly first in Buffalo and then a
little farther downriver at Black Rock across from Fort
Erie, doing nothing because
the Fenians had managed to actually sabotage the Michigan’s
effectiveness.

The 120-man crew of the Michigan had
been thoroughly infiltrated: There was a seventeen-man circle of Fenians aboard
led by one of the mates, William E. Leonard, who was in direct communication
with Sweeny in New York and with Patrick O’Day, the Fenian “centre” in Buffalo.[134]
The Michigan Fenians had raised one hundred dollars for the cause and
sent a map of Lake Erie, together with detailed intelligence about the Welland
Canal and its locks and defences.[135]
The Fenians were acutely aware of the danger presented to their plan by the Michigan
and of the need to somehow take the vessel out of action.[136]
The assignment was given to Second Assistant Engineer James P. Kelley.[137]

On the night of May 31, when the crew
were ordered to report to the vessel, Kelley diverted the ship’s pilot, Patrick
Murphy, by a generous flow of whiskey and cigars, along with the tender
attentions of “a lady friend.”[138] Kelley and
Murphy staggered aboard the Michigan only at 5 A.M. after the main body
of Fenians had successfully finished crossing the Niagara River. Both were
immediately arrested, but Murphy was ordered nonetheless to pilot the ship
toward the Fenian base. Murphy guided the vessel as far as the ferry docks at
Black Rock but then begged off from continuing, claiming he was not familiar
with the river beyond. The Michigan came to a halt again. As the Michigan lay helpless, a
little farther down the river Fenian tugs and barges continued to cross back
and forth unhindered, bringing supplies and reinforcements to O’Neill’s forces on the Canadian shore. The
last successful Fenian crossing
was made in daylight at 11:00A.M. on June 1. It was only after another river pilot was brought
on board that the Michigan finally steamed out at 11:20 A.M. and took
its position to block any further Fenian reinforcements.[139]The Fenians had been crossing unhindered for nearly twelve hours. The
next and last attempt to re-supply the Fenians was made by a tug towing a barge
at 2:50 P.M., but it was promptly intercepted and seized by the Michigan.[140]

Endgame

As Canadian and British units deployed on June 1 and began to march
to join together and intercept the Fenians in the Niagara region, O’Neill
decided to ambush them. On the morning of June 2, at Limestone Ridge just
outside the village of Ridgeway, O’Neill’s brigade of approximately 700 to 800
Fenians, attacked a Canadian brigade of 841 militia volunteers attempting to
unite with the British. The Canadians fought resolutely for nearly two hours,
while the British stood by doing nothing. O’Neill’s experienced Civil War
veterans prevailed over the teenaged store clerks, farm boys and U of T
students. Nine Canadians, including three university students were killed and twenty-eight
were wounded, some seriously enough to require amputation of their limbs,
before a Fenian bayonet charge drove them off the field. Several hours later,
O’Neill realizing that no further reinforcements were coming from the U.S.,
returned to Fort Erie where his forces overran a small 72-man detachment of
Canadians which had retaken the town, wounding severely another five and
capturing thirty-seven.

Once in control of Fort Erie again, O’Neill found his supply
lines now permanently cut by the Michigan and while he waited in the
hope that the Fenians in New York would find an alternative route into Canada,
some 22,000 Canadians were mobilizing along the Ontario and Quebec borders
to engage any further Fenian incursions. As British and Canadian forces began
to close in around the town of Fort Erie with artillery and cavalry, O’Neill
saw no option but to release his Canadian prisoners and withdraw his forces
back into the United States in the early morning hours of June 3, ending the
invasion on the Niagara frontier. The Fenians were arrested by the U.S. Navy
mid-river and held for several days before being paroled to their home states.

In the end it was not the incompetence of the Fenian in executing
their mobilization, nor the power of the British Army or the courage and
sacrifice of the Canadian militia that saved Canada, but the U.S. Navy that
stopped further Fenian reinforcements and supplies from crossing the river.

ENDNOTES

[3]
Peter Vronsky, Ridgeway: The American Fenian Invasion and the 1866 Battle
That Made Canada, Toronto: Allen Lane-Penguin Books, 2011.

[4]
John O’Neill had earned his reputation leading a famous cavalry charge on July
19, 1863 that broke Confederate General John Morgan’s Raiders on Buffington Bar
in the Ohio River as Morgan was attempting to cross back into West Virginia. O’Neill
had only fifty horsemen. Morgan had 2,460 men, artillery, and plunder. In a
war when traditional cavalry charges (and bayonet wounds) had become relatively
rare, O’Neill’s troop of horsemen rode headlong with sabers drawn into Morgan’s
column. The charge was so sudden and savage (O’Neill himself, while mounted,
had killed two men with his sabre in the charge) that Morgan’s column scattered
abandoning their artillery and supplies while six hundred of his men fled in
panic straight into U.S. Navy gunboats and were captured on the shoreline.
Without supplies or artillery, Morgan’s Raiders who had been raiding into Ohio
for months surrendered several days later. See: Gerald R. Noonan, “General John
O’Neill,” Clogher Record, Vol. 6, No. 2, (Clogher Historical Society:
1967), pp. 277–319.; C.P. Stacey, John O’Neill: The Story of the Fenian
Paladin [unpublished manuscript], n.d., C.P. Stacey Papers, University of
Toronto Archives. Stacey cites, War of the Rebellion, Official
Records, Series I, Vol. 23, Part i, pp. 367–369, Report of Colonel Felise
W. Graham (O’Neill killed two with his sabre).

[5]
Susannah Ural Bruce, “‘Remember Your Country and Keep Up Its Credit’: Irish

Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861–-1865,” Journal
of Military History, Vol.

[15]
Seward to Killian, November 20, 1865, Reel 92: The Papers of William Henry
Seward Microfilm set in Department of Rare Books and Special Collections,
University of Rochester Library. See also, W.S. Neidhardt, p. 30

[25]
Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in
Britain 1790-1988, London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. p. 83. On British
reluctance to spy domestically, see also Christopher Andrew, The Defense of
the Realm: The Authorized History of MI-5, London: Penguin Books, 2009, and
Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community,
London: Penguin Books, 1989; and Bernard Porter, Origins of the Vigilant
State: The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch Before the First World War,
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987.

[28]
Frank J. Merli, The Alabama, British Neutrality and the American Civil War,
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004; The Association to Commemorate
the Chinese Serving in the American Civil War, The connection between the
American Civil War (1861-1865) and the Chinese Taiping Civil War (1850-1864)
[http://sites.google.com/site/accsacw/Home/connection retrieved June 10, 2010]

[29]
On George Denison’s collaboration with the Confederate Secret Service and
harbouring of agents at his home near Dovercourt and College in Toronto,
(Heydon Park Villa) see his autobiography, George T. Denison, Soldiering in
Canada, Toronto: George L. Morang & Co., 1901; his financing of the
secret conversion and arming in Ontario of a Confederate gunboat to raid a
Union-run prisoner of war camp on Lake Eire, is reported by the U.S. Consul in
Toronto in DFUSCT; Denison’s United Empire Loyalist ‘southern plantation’
sentiments are well described in Carl Berger, A Sense of Power: Studies in
the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1970. pp. 15-16 and David Gagan, The Denison Family of Toronto, 1792-1925,
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973. See also: George Taylor
Denison III fonds, MG29-E29, LAC

[35]
Jenkins, Brian. Fenians and Anglo-American Relations, Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1969 and Leon Ó Broin, Fenian Fever: An
Anglo-American Dilemma, New York: New York University Press, 1971

[36]
Accounts and Papers, State Papers of the House of Commons, Session 4
February-29 July 1864, Vol. 32 [Vol. 63], p. 45; Andrew Wilson, The "Ever-Victorious
Army" A History of the Chinese Campaign Under Lt.-Col. C.G. Gordon and the
Suppression of the Tai-Ping Rebellion, Edinburgh and London, William
Blackwood and Sons, 1868, pp. 241-277; Augustus F. Lindley, Ti-ping
Tien-kwoh: the History of the Ti-ping Revolution, including a narrative of the
author’s personal adventures, London: Day & Son Limited, 1866; Anthony
Preston and John Major, Send a Gunboat: A study of the Gunboat and its role
in British Policy, 1854-1904, London: Longmans, 1967.

[38]
Adams to Clarendon, December 28, 1865, in
Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, Executive
Documents Printed by the Order of The House of Representatives During the
Second Session of the Thirty-Ninth Congress, 1866-’67, Volume 13 (1866),
Part I, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1867, pp. 43
[Hereinafter Papers
Relating to Foreign Relations]

[40]
Frank J. Merli, The Alabama, British Neutrality and the American Civil War,
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004; The Association to Commemorate
the Chinese Serving in the American Civil War, The connection between the
American Civil War (1861-1865) and the Chinese Taiping Civil War (1850-1864)
[http://sites.google.com/site/accsacw/Home/connection retrieved June 10, 2010];

[75]
Seward papers are enormous, spanning multiple record groups and archives in New
York, Albany, Auburn, Rochester and Washington. My cursory search through them
which revealed little on the Fenian question was by no claim exhaustive or
definitive.

[76]
Seward to Speed, April 2, 1866, Letters Received by the Secretary of War from
the President, Executive Departments, and War Department Bureaus 1862-1870,
(National Archives Microfilm Publication M494, roll 88); Records of the Office
of the Secretary of War, 1791 -1947, Record Group 107; National Archives
Building, Washington, DC. NARA

[78]
Lawrence to Carlton, April 7, 1866; Ruggles to Carlton, April 21, 1866

[79]
In addition to items cited elsewhere in these pages, see also descriptions of
active measures taken by U.S. authorities against Fenian armed threats: March
13, 1866, Bvt. Brig. Gen. Simon F. Barstow, adjt. for Maj. Gen. George G.
Meade, to Bvt. Col. Ely S. Parker; March 16, 23, 26, 1866, Barstow (for Meade)
to H.Q., reports on U.S. Army actions against Fenian activities in New York
State, Records of the Headquarters of the Army 1828-1903, Letters Received, RG
108; Parker to Meade, April 5, 1866, Letters Received, Department of the
East, Records of the U.S. Army Continental Commands, 1817 – 1940, RG 393;
Stanton to Meade, April 16, 1866, Letters Received from Bureaus, Records of the
Office of the Secretary of War, RG107; Meade to H.Q., April 19, 20; May 16, 28,
30, 1866; H.Q. to Meade, May 30, 1866, Telegrams Received, RG 108; Letters
Sent, Military Division of the Atlantic, RG 393, National Archives Building,
Washington D.C NARA

[97]
Seward to Johnson, July 31, 1866, Letters Received by the Secretary of War from
the President, Executive Departments, and War Department Bureaus 1862-1870,
(National Archives Microfilm Publication M494, roll 88); Records of the Office
of the Secretary of War, 1791 -1947, Record Group 107; National Archives
Building, Washington, DC.

[98]
On March 16, 23, 26, Bvt. Brig. Gen. Simon F. Barstow, adjt. For Maj. Gen.
George G. Meade, Philadelphia forwarded reports to H.Q. on Fenian activities in
New York State. On March 31, Meade, Philadelphia, to H.Q. “I have directed the
seizure of any arms…”, in Records of the Headquarters of the Army 1828-1903,
Letters Received, RG 108, NARA

[118]
Joseph W. Caddell, “Deception 101: Primer on Deception,” Conference on
StrategicDeception in Modern Democracies: Ethical, Legal, and Policy
Challenges, U.S. Army War College, October 31, 2003, at the William C.
Friday Conference Centre, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.